


Casting Shadows, Interrupted

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Genderqueer Character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-29
Updated: 2011-07-29
Packaged: 2018-03-31 14:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3982057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco Malfoy is an adept of wizarding photography; Teddy Lupin is his model.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Casting Shadows, Interrupted

**Author's Note:**

> Remus Lupin survived the War; Sirius Black came back from beyond the Veil (probably out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness)--neither features in the story. Draco Malfoy had an amicable divorce and has an arrangement with Blaise Zabini that neither will admit is in itself a marriage. My betas were both wonderfully patient with the way I distort the English language and amazing at beating it back into shape.

"How do you want me?"

Every day this. Draco doesn't look up; he rarely does--instead looking at you through the view-finder, hair falling out of its usual neatness. A photograph of him, legs stretched out on either side of the tripod, robes discarded over the back of the chair, sleeves pushed up, the morning light shining through his hair--that would be something, you think, to show in an exhibit. A Portrait of the Artist. No dice, though, the one time you suggested it his face clammed up, shut down. You're a good enough Hogwarts boy to remember the motto.

"There's a purple dress in the wardrobe," he says, adjusting one of the knobs--he's told you the name ten times in ten days of waxing and waning indignation. It stays in your mind a sum of five minutes; photography is not your medium, never has been--your father gave you words tumbling themselves inside out to give you meaning, your mother's quicksilver smile twisting up in you started your fascination with the protean nature of self. Photography is limiting, even wizarding photography, too realistic to be real: who remembers a phoenix by the articulation of its wing?

The dress is silk, shifting colours in the light from the lilac straps in your hands to the lush purple of ripe grape at the hem. It's the sort of thing Victoire might wear to Hogsmeade or on a date, and you've shifted almost without conscious thought, to slender hands with long nails and a callus under the left thumb, to Victoire's face and Victoire's sleek hair. You are hesitating about your body beneath your robes, unwilling to exhibit a secret and unable to falsify the familiar. He sets a hand on your shoulder, turns you and tips your head up. It's his left hand, you notice, paralysed by the touch-- the photographer's hand, easy and professional, but Draco's smile, close and familial. Liar.

"You have got to stop relying on people you know, Theo." Always, always Theo, never Teddy, never Ted--though, thank God, never Theodore, either. "You're too old for it, you'll never be first-class if you keep to simple mimicry." He releases you, walks a long step back. "And you the artist."

"You haven't told me how you want me," you say, fighting to keep your face still. Your hands, indecisive, are each one shape, clasped through the straps of the dress, Victoire Weasley holding hands with Teddy Lupin. Till today, he has offered only minor suggestions--the hair a trifle straighter, Theo, the eyes a shade lighter--never rejected outright any form you have chosen to adopt. You have not shifted this morning, not completely.

He takes the dress from your grasping hands. The fabric is twisted, and his hands run over it, quick and careful. "I saw a woman in a cafe in Calais last week. She was..." He nods once, twice, smiling off at the distance, at his memories of Calais, of running off to see Mr. Zabini last week. Last Saturday you came by and saw the door locked, no sign of habitation, no indication he wanted to come back, to continue. Great-Aunt Cissa had offered you lunch and a lack of explanations. Your father had noticed that you were in a bad temper, and he barely registers you these days. Draco looks at you again, eyes widening in surprise that you are still yourself--your usual self, Victoire faded into only the too-long nail on your left thumb.

"If you're going to be difficult," he says, "you might as well go home, child."

"You haven't told me what you want." You hold your face, lower your chin: you will not try and guess. Bad habit. Childish. Presumptuous.

"Tall," he says, "keep your height." He hands the dress back, looking down its sheer fall; his hair is in his eyes again, and you have to ball your hands in fists to keep from reaching out. "Put it on and then we'll proceed; I don't require an exact replica."

You switch to a female body while undressing; look up and realise Draco's averted his eyes. Always that, even when your body is not yours--it never is, when you undress for him, and he never looks; one day you will ask him to photograph you in the nude, in any form he chooses, and he will decline. The dress fits strangely, made for a body unlike the one you have chosen--this body is a blank slate, with mousy hair and a quiet face and sloping, narrow shoulders.

"Alterations, maestro?"

He puts his hands by your shoulders, an inch away, and smiles when you expand to fill them. This is new, too--the few times Draco's wanted a particular face from you, there have been snapshots blurry with inexpertise, portraits yellowed with age. Your shoulders, now, are as broad as they ever are. The straps fit closer to your neck than before, the dress drapes differently over your breasts. He rests his hand over your chest, two decorous inches above the cloth, presses down against air--you are tempted to stay as you are, feel his touch on silk on skin. You let your breasts shrink. He moves away.

"Let your hair curl down," he says, and, lighter, with a smile in it, "darker, Theo, keep your colours." Darkly curling hair to your shoulders, the warm black of mink. Dark eyes, dark blue till they're nearly black. It's Draco's fault you've started thinking like this of the features you wear every day, as a mask to which greatest attention must be devoted since greatest use is obtained from it. You are eighteen, this summer, and cannot retire into schoolboy frivolity about changing appearances.

Draco nods, once, eyes distant as if matching you to that remembered woman. "Come along," he says, picks his camera carefully up. You follow him, barefoot over the dark stone--somewhere up above your heads, Scorpius is negotiating with his tutor for a vacation and Great-Aunt Cissa is watching the clock in the next room to judge when she should intervene and prevent war between them; Mr. Zabini is unpacking his several vials. It is easy to forget them here, under Draco's watchful eyes and exacting demands.

Week before last the door had opened out into a twilit garden and you had knelt in the dirt and attempted to charm the bloodwort into submission while it tried to pierce your skin and send tendrils floating through your flesh. You can't think why most magical plants are dangerous. Your cloak was muddy by the end of it, your shoes caked. Draco had grinned at you, happy, while you swept your sodden mass of hair out of your eyes.

This morning there is another room beyond the door, warm with candle-light gleaming on the bronze bed, on the crystal surface of the mirror. Draco opens the door and lets you in, propping it open before entering himself. The mirror shows you together at the open door, the cold, clear light an unwelcome contrast to the close darknesses of the room.

He waits for you to walk into the room, a moment, two, courteous, then smiles secretly to himself and brushes past, wand drawn. He changes the lights, the mirror, the draping of covers and clothing on the bed, shifting from one to another and back, as if--infected by your contagious indecision--he hadn't known what he needed. This is the first time in two months--all the time you have been coming to him hidden behind a camera, a week of days--that Draco hasn't stood insouciant in this space and watched you watch it, through his eyes, through the lenses of his camera.

It lends you an edge of confidence you hadn't known to miss, and you walk slowly into the room, the dress clinging to your ankles, brushing the coarse fur of the rug, the subtle weave of the carpet. It's a warm room, not nearly feminine enough for the girl you had thought would wear the dress. It's nearly stereotypically a man's room, skins on the floor and heraldic animals on the walls--a single wand, enshrined above the bed. Not a girl's room. You move to change to fit it, pulling age onto your features. He'd met a woman, not a schoolgirl.

"Don't," Draco says, voice sharp with anxiety. You turn to look at him, and he twists his mouth into a smile. "You're right as you are. Stand in front of the mirror," he adds, "look at yourself."

In the mirror you're eighteen, with your own dark eyes and your own dark curls, and all the imperfections your body has accrued that you never melt away--the scar across the right shoulder where a Bludger split the skin; the crook where your right thumb broke and set wrong; the faint indentation above the nose you've inherited from your father. Yourself, but a girl, out of place in this dark room heavy with a longer life than yours. Hers.

Draco is smiling, reflected in the mirror behind you, his camera cradled in one hand, the strap dangling loose around his neck, slipping beneath the collar of his shirt. He looks like the man who owns the room and the girl in it. Owns her, you, Teddy Lupin. Looks like. He owns you about as much as you're a girl in a purple dress. You raise your chin and smile at him. The flash limns you golden in reflected light.

Draco says, voice low, fiddling with his camera, "Change."

You turn to look at him, startled. A single shot is strange enough--but nothing much is familiar today, not even the absent weight of Draco's glance on your skin, assessing. But you never do two scenes in a single day; he takes the entire room apart, constructs it entirely new every week, so you might step onto a Venetian gondola, or an English garden, or, as today, into the bedroom of a French girl. Two together would be taxing--you know, you've been told how long it takes to craft everything from memory; this room is bare on days it remains unused, among the most mundane in the house. It's what makes Draco peculiar, remarkable, some strange cross between a painter and a photographer. It's why you are useful to him, why he'd been so nearly depressed when Alexei left him for greener shores.

This is not on the cards, this flippant demand, and you cannot keep shock from your fluid face. You have learnt to show emotion on a hundred--thousand hundred thousand--faces. But you have learnt also not to waste words on Draco, not to show impertinence, ignorance, a lack of understanding. Here you are his marionette to position as he pleases. Tomorrow, at any other day/place/time he will be more than courteous, will be genuine, scolding, mocking, interested. Now he will send you home for lack of co-operation. You say, voice dragged down to grind emotion out, "How do you want me?"

He smiles, a secret smile like your father's when you have fought your way through an argument and found yourself standing in the clear spaces of truth, of reason--a teacher's smile, full of hidden pride. "Be yourself," he says; indicates the clothes on the bed with one too-elegant hand. The left hand, the left arm, the Dark Mark still on it. It took him three weeks to roll his sleeves up for you. When you were a child, five, six, just after he'd returned from France, married the first time--the only time, this isn't a marriage he's in--he used to play with you, running circles and racing brooms and, once when you were alone at home and Sirius had cajoled him into watching you, he took you swimming in the lake on the Manor grounds, and didn't flinch when you wrapped both hands around his forearm, holding on.

You change as you walk, shrugging on the new form--the old form, the usual always Teddy Lupin that you once refused to alter even for age or height and made your father stifle exhausted smiles and made Sirius descend into manic restlessness--while you slip out of the dress. You shouldn't do this, shouldn't do it like this, should've skinned into the trousers, at least. When you pulled the dress on it was a different body, it was nobody's body, was Blank Slate #2 (Adult Female). It didn't matter. Draco's eyes are on you, now, burning your skin. You keep your eyes on your hands fastening the buttons of the shirt. The robes are a match for the dress, the same shifting purple fastening to your throat.

"As you were," Draco says, straightening out of his slouch.

The room is the same. It must be, you have seen him alter nothing. The light is different, and there are the subtle alterations of a time-lapse charm. It was there last time, and the bloodwort bloomed in the last photograph. It isn't much of a surprise. It shouldn't be. But the bed is tousled, the clothes you've shed subsumed into the rumpled sheets. There's a loom in the shadows by the bed, a half-worked tapestry on the woman's worktable beside it. In the mirror you are yourself, hair curling darkly to your shoulders, blue eyes black in the low light. You frown, begin to move out of the light, out of sight in the mirror, grasping at some vague realisation.

"Stay."

You obey, struck by the sharpness of his voice--he's anxious, he's been anxious all this while, and now you know why. He's moved out of the mirror, away from you. The flash hits the side of your face as you try to locate him, and you turn fully the moment the shutter clicks, so the next shot is of your twisted spine, your face in three-quarters profile. There was no woman, no cafe in Calais where he waited while you waited before his locked door.

"You want me," you say, somewhere shocked to manage the words without faltering.

Draco looks away.

In the mirror his smile is a sliver of white under the fall of his fair hair, his hands clasping the protruding lens of the camera. You seem stiff, still like a puppet with its strings cut. Your curls have grown closer to your scalp, your skin has darkened, your eye grown greater.


End file.
